Andrea Jarvis Hamilton is a fine-art photographer known for her monumental lightboxes of natural phenomena like icebergs and for her candid portraits of London's creative personalities. Her work encompasses several photographic genres including portraiture, street photography and landscape, and questions subjects as varied as climate change, identity or place as they relate to other creative disciplines. Hamilton has been short-listed for several notable photography prizes including the 7th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers, Chantel Paul’s Honorable Mention at The Centre for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the 9th Arte Laguna Prize and the Judges Choice at the AOP Open Awards 2013.
Biography
Hamilton was born in Peru but by her teens had lived in Mexico City, Minneapolis and London. She studied law at university before joining S.G. Warburg as an Equity Analyst in Latin American Mining. After leaving to have a family, Hamilton did not return to business, but studied photography at Photofusion and traditional print methods at the Black and White School. As well as working as an artist, Hamilton also runs AHStudio, an art space based in Belgravia which was established in 2014.
Artistic style
Hamilton works across multiple photographic genres including fine art, landscape, urban photography and street photography. Hamilton's works frequently examine the durational capacity of photography which implies the contingency of both past and future as related in Roland Barthes’ notion of time. On one hand, Hamilton detains the landscape in a sort of infinite present that transforms the image into a haiku poem, as it occurs in her series Tidal Resonance, shown at Delahunty in 2014. On the other hand, her portraits remind the audience that posing in front of the camera entails the enactment of the future emphasising the timelessness and dignity of her subjects, as seen in her surreal portraits of children in Wondrous Strange. Hamilton also employs photography to create images that bring out the emotional potential of an environment, achieving images that are both personal and universal. Her street photography is driven by "the prospect of witnessing something special and spontaneous", as evidenced in her London Every Day series in which a daily snapshot of London shows the changing seasons. Her street photography is notable for its acute sensitivity to and understanding of natural light, and its ability to morph the ordinary into something strange and sometimes otherworldly.
Books
Hamilton has published three books of photographs. Her first, AH20, published in 2014, collects together the works created under the series Tidal Resonance and Luminous Icescapes, and includes an introduction by Rabih Hage and essays by Anthony Downey and Ben Eastham. In 2015 she was one of the photographers commissioned to photograph London's creative scene for the book London Burning: Portraits of a Creative City. The book includes interviews and photographs of various creative personalities including Edmund de Waal, Tamara Rojo, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Matthew Slotover. The book London Every Day includes street photography and looks at the beauty and creativity of regular life and was commissioned by The Mayor’s Fund for London. London Every Day includes an introduction by Charlotte Cotton, plus images choices and contributions from David Adjaye, John Frieda, Anish Kapoor, Sir Elton John, Mary McCartney, Martin Sorrell and Charlize Theron among others.
Exhibitions
2011 The Art Council Annual Juried Exhibition, USA - group show
